The WEEK

T he Star of Bethlehem, which once caught up the civilized world in joy, recedes from the sight of the millions upon millions who, waiting and praying these many years, are ripe for despair. The Christians on the dark side of the Iron Curtain—and they still number in the tens and scores of millions— have spent lifetimes waiting upon deliverance, and every year that goes by, they have reason to believe that their fate is less and less a concern of that part of Christendom where the light of Bethlehem still shines.

But that is a paradox, surely? How can the spirit of Christmas be with any of us, without engendering a more purposive compassion for the spiritually oppressed? Has Christmas become for us merely a Mammonized and antic holiday, one of these excuses, evenly spaced throughout the calendar, for a day’s rest from our workaday concerns? Can it be that the brightness of the Bethlehem Star is diminishing equally on both sides of the Iron Curtain, that the despair of the East is in exact correspondence with the sloth of the West—that they are organically interconnected, that the currents go back and forth at a level deeper than that to which the Iron Curtain descends?

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Presidential Election

T he Star of Bethlehem, which once caught up the civilized world in joy, recedes from the sight of the millions upon millions who, waiting and praying these many years, are ripe for despair. The Christians on the dark side of the Iron Curtain—and they still number in the tens and scores of millions— have spent lifetimes waiting upon deliverance, and every year that goes by, they have reason to believe that their fate is less and less a concern of that part of Christendom where the light of Bethlehem still shines.

But that is a paradox, surely? How can the spirit of Christmas be with any of us, without engendering a more purposive compassion for the spiritually oppressed? Has Christmas become for us merely a Mammonized and antic holiday, one of these excuses, evenly spaced throughout the calendar, for a day’s rest from our workaday concerns? Can it be that the brightness of the Bethlehem Star is diminishing equally on both sides of the Iron Curtain, that the despair of the East is in exact correspondence with the sloth of the West—that they are organically interconnected, that the currents go back and forth at a level deeper than that to which the Iron Curtain descends?